Balanchine & the Lost Muse
Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer
-
- $229.00
-
- $229.00
Descripción editorial
Here is the first dual biography of the early lives of two key figures in Russian ballet: famed choreographer George Balanchine and his close childhood friend and extraordinary ballerina Liidia (Lidochka) Ivanova.
Tracing the lives and friendship of these two dancers from years just before the 1917 Russian Revolution to Balanchine's escape from Russia in 1924, Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine & the Lost Muse sheds new light on a crucial flash point in the history of ballet. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Kendall weaves a fascinating tale about this decisive period in the life of the man who would become the most influential choreographer in modern ballet. Abandoned by his mother at the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet Academy in 1913 at the age of nine, Balanchine spent his formative years studying dance in Russia's tumultuous capital city. It was there, as he struggled to support himself while studying and performing, that Balanchine met Ivanova. A talented and bold dancer who grew close to the Bolshevik elite in her adolescent years, Ivanova was a source of great inspiration to Balanchine--both during their youth together, and later in his life, after her mysterious death just days before they had planned to leave Russia together in 1924. Kendall shows that although Balanchine would have a great number of muses, many of them lovers, the dark beauty of his dear friend Lidochka would inspire much of his work for years to come.
Part biography and part cultural history, Balanchine & the Lost Muse presents a sweeping account of the heyday of modern ballet and the culture behind the unmoored ideals, futuristic visions, and human decadence that characterized the Russian Revolution.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this extensively researched, if overly detailed, dual biography, literature professor and dance critic Kendall (Autobiography of a Wardrobe) posits that ballet dancer Lidia Ivanova (1903-1924) had an enduring influence on the long and illustrious choreographic career of Georgi Balanchivadze (1904-1983), known in the West since 1925 as George Balanchine. Tracing the obscure origins and early childhoods of both figures, through their years at St. Petersburg's Imperial Theater School from 1914 until 1921, and into the mid-1920s, Kendall juxtaposes the classmates' rarified lives with the political turmoil of Russia in the teens and '20s. This generation of dancers, Kendall contends, trained in prerevolutionary ballet technique but assimilated new Soviet-era tenets into their psyches, thereby creating a modern style of ballet embodied by Ivanova as a dancer and Balanchine as choreographer. Highlights include contemporaries' recollections of Ivanova's performances and an analysis of her mystique attributable to her physique, intense musicality, and deep "compulsion to reach audiences" as well as a discussion of selected Balanchine works from the 1920s through to his final masterpiece, Mozartiana. An uneasy combination of history and biography, the book informs readers unfamiliar with the cultural history of the period but leaves balletomanes hungry for more convincing connections between the so-called muse and the master choreographer. Map and b&w photos.
